economagicImport no longer working correctly due to change in economagic.com's data format
Yohan Chalabi
chalabi at phys.ethz.ch
Tue Oct 14 11:05:28 CEST 2008
>>>> "CGG" == "Christopher G. Green" <christopher.g.green at gmail.com>
>>>> on Sat, 11 Oct 2008 10:52:28 -0700
CGG> Greetings,
CGG>
CGG> Economagic.com has changed the format of the HTML representation of some of
CGG> their data sets. It seems they have done this to break tools like
CGG> economagicImport.
CGG>
CGG> Consider the following (in R 2.7.2 with the current versions of fImport,
CGG> etc.).
CGG>
CGG> zzz <- economagicImport("fedny/day-fxus2eu", save=F, freq="daily")
CGG>
CGG> > tail(zzz at data)
CGG> DATE VALUE
CGG> 2457 2008-10-03 NA
CGG> 2458 2008-10-06 NA
CGG> 2459 2008-10-07 NA
CGG> 2460 2008-10-08 NA
CGG> 2461 2008-10-09 NA
CGG> 2462 2008-10-10 1.3471
CGG>
CGG> If you go to the actual web site
CGG>
CGG> http://www.economagic.com/em-cgi/data.exe/fedny/day-fxus2eu
CGG>
CGG> and look at the source code you will see that they have inserted an entity
CGG> representation "•" for '.' in some places (and possibly more "white"
CGG> characters).
CGG>
CGG> >From my five minutes of looking at the source code for economagicImport it
CGG> seems like a well-placed 'gsub' to change all of the entities to periods
CGG> would fix things (since then the conversion to numeric would work). I
CGG> haven't had time to test that idea out, but hopefully I have given you
CGG> enough detail to understand what's going on.
CGG>
CGG> Chris Green
thanks Chris to point this out.
I have updated the function in the dev-package on r-forge.
regards,
Yohan
--
PhD student
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology
Zurich
www.ethz.ch
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